Jiddu Krishnamurti -
We say so easily that we love our children; but is
there love in our hearts when we accept the existing
social conditions, when we do not want to bring
about a fundamental transformation in this
destructive society? And as long as we look to the
specialists to educate our children, this confusion
and misery will continue; for the specialists, being
concerned with the part and not with the whole, are
themselves unintegrated.
Instead of being the most honoured and responsible
occupation, education is now considered slightingly,
and most educators are fixed in a routine. They are
not really concerned with integration and
intelligence, but with the imparting of information;
and a man who merely imparts information with the
world crashing about him is not an educator.
An educator is not merely a giver of information; he
is one who points the way to wisdom, to truth. Truth
is far more important than the teacher. The search
for truth is religion, and truth is of no country,
of no creed, it is not to be found in any temple,
church or mosque. Without the search for truth,
society soon decays. To create a new society, each
one of us has to be a true teacher, which means that
we have to be both the pupil and the master; we have
to educate ourselves.
If a new social order is to be established, those
who teach merely to earn a salary can obviously have
no place as teachers. To regard education as a means
of livelihood is to exploit the children for one's
own advantage. In an enlightened society, teachers
will have no concern for their own welfare, and the
community will provide for their needs.
The true teacher is not he who has built up an
impressive educational organization, nor he who is
an instrument of the politicians, nor he who is
bound to an ideal, a belief or a country. The true
teacher is inwardly rich and therefore asks nothing
for himself; he is not ambitious and seeks no power
in any form; he does not use teaching as a means of
acquiring position or authority, and therefore he is
free from the compulsion of society and the control
of governments. Such teachers have the primary place
in an enlightened civilization, for true culture is
founded, not on the engineers and technicians, but
on the educators.
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